permaculture-savvy engineer? Bitterroot Valley in Montana

I'm looking to consult a permie-savvy engineer on terracing and/or building a retaining wall to stabilize a steep, ground-squirrel-infested slope below an eroding gravel road in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. Can anyone recommend someone like that? Thanks y'al!

Can you supply some photos to see the situation please?
Is it a public road?

Sarauna Torrez wrote:I'm looking to consult a permie-savvy engineer on terracing and/or building a retaining wall to stabilize a steep, ground-squirrel-infested slope below an eroding gravel road in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. Can anyone recommend someone like that? Thanks y'al!

That's me. We'll need a basic description of the plot (size, slope, shape), soil tests, a perc test, rain data, wind and insolation data, USGS map, Google Earth and county maps / aerial photographs, and most important a ballpark estimate on available time, money, locally available inputs, and labor.

Also from a permaculture perspective we will need to talk about present uses and future uses of the land, function of the road, long-term nature of the instability, and most importantly all of your notes from observations that you or others have made of the nature of the road deterioration in the context of the land it runs through over the course of various seasonal changes and in different types of traffic and weather conditions.

Consultation is free as long as we keep the discussion crowdsourced here. If you need any actual consulting work done separate from this post we can talk about rates and deliverables at that point.

I'll try to get some pics up soon, and more precise numbers, but basically it's a private road that passes housing and barns on one side, with the hill on the other. It's used to access the lower, riparian part of the acreage, including carrying some heavy equipment, and is only about 20-25 feet wide at the narrowest part. That part of the property is a giant sand and gravel wash with a bit of topsoil holding it down;  it was used as a gravel mine at one time. The hill swoops from about 45 degrees at the top to maybe 30 at the bottom, and is probably around 50 or 60 feet in elevation. As for climate and precipitation, well, it's Western Montana... it ranges from -40 to 110 degrees F, with up to four feet of snow in winter, short torrential downpours in spring, and hot, dry, fiery summers. Each year is markedly different in precipitation, frost dates, and high water levels (I should mention the bottom 8 feet of the hill is in a 30-year flood plain). The wind can tear through here too, in gusts up to 80 mph. The slope is fairly protected from those, though, as it faces East and a pond; the valley runs North-South, so that's the way the wind usually blows.  We have a lot of big cottonwoods, gravel, feed bags, and round river rocks to play with, along with a few tons of horse manure each year. We'd like to, mainly, stabilize the slope, but also cultivate some perennial food crops, which means that these terraces must also keep goats and horses out! And of course, we'd like to do it as cheaply as possible...

What are your available labor inputs?

Hi!  We plan to do it ourselves, primarily by hand.  There are 4 of us here on the property.

We have quite a lot of wood to work with, as you can see in the photo of the hillside in the link.  We would like to use as much of that as possible.

In the link below there is a panorama view of hillside, complete with good dog going after ground squirrels.  As you can see it has become the de facto wood storage area.
There is also an overhead view with the hillside outlined in blue

https://photos.app.goo.gl/PNceffVCG9zGDxcr9


That perc test looks easy enough to do;  I'll get that started today.

Perc test results:
Test 1 average 10 min/in
Test 2 average 16 min/in